10/29/12

The
licensed private-eye Barr Breed, prowling those mean streets of Chicago, has
two recorded cases to his credit, The Body in the Bed (1948) and The
Body Beautiful (1949), written by Bill S. Ballinger – an associate
professor of writing who worked in advertising and broadcasting. You can read
more about Ballinger and his work on the Thrilling Detective Website, which
includes an uncomplimentary blurb from Anthony Boucher’s review of The Body
Beautiful:

"A
shabby museum of every cliché of plot, style and action."

Well, I
can't entirely disagree with Boucher's opinion, but still, I think that label
is more applicable to the book discussed on here a few days ago, Murder at
Grassmere Abbey (1934), than to this little hardboiled conundrum and with
that book still fresh in my memory – I felt that the short comings in this one
were less of an issue. Sure, it does go through the motions of pulpy,
dime-store paperback, but I kind of liked how the hardboiled voice resonated in
a theatrical setting and the plot wasn't bad for what is essentially just
pulp.

For
Breed, the headache begins when Benny and Rusty try to set him up
with Coffee Stearns, a drop dead gorgeous showgirl currently performing in Golden
Girls at the old Marlowe Theatre, but Coffee is a solitary minded girl
whose only expectation of Breed is to pick a corner to die in. That is, until
she learns that he's a P.I. and promises to pay him in kind for
his patient attentions, if he does a job for her, but the last thing he ever
sees of Coffee is her falling from a gild swinging cage, open in front and
elevated above the stage, into the orchestra pit – a knife is firmly planted in
her gold-painted back.

Breed's
cop-buddy Cheenan takes command of the case and at times takes even more from
Breed than Cramer would have from Wolfe and Archie! Like shoving him from an
elevator, while knocking down the lift attendant and greasing a cab driver for
a quick getaway, but things like that doesn't deter them from bouncing light-hearted threats
and verbal jabs off each other the moment they make contact. Hey, I said that I
sort of agreed with Boucher and once you've made it pass the chapter with the
hospital scene, in which a stitched-up Breed shrugs of the effects of a bomb
blast before charging the streets, you've (pretty much) left the worst part
behind you.

Anyway,
Breed and Cheenan turn the old, but refurbished, Marlowe Theatre inside-out for
evidence, interview Coffee's co-workers and everyone even remotely connected to
her and tangle with anonymous clients, unwilling witnesses, two more corpses
and a prowler with a gun – as well as tangling with each other. But the best
parts were the solution to Coffee's stabbing and the dénouement.

Coffee
Stearns was stabbed while sitting in an inaccessible cage, suspended above the
floor, and while a seasoned knife-thrower was part of the show, that notion was
never seriously entertained and a gleam that was seen shooting up to the cage,
from the front side, made me suspect that the knife was worked with fish wire.
My reasoning was that the swinging of the cage made a spring (or a contraption) unnecessary.
It could be simply pulled in place with a wire, as Coffee was backing up when
the cage began to ascend and move, but Ballinger relayed on a very Carrian gimmick –
giving it a nifty twist in this particular setting.

Not anything spectacular,
but interesting for impossible crime buffs and also disappointing that this
angle of the problem got very little exposure. But I did like how Breed
gathered the suspects and began tying up the loose ends, all the
while building up the suspense by buzzing in people, until everyone has been fed
enough information to realize for themselves who the murderer is.

The
Body Beautiful is
not for you if you're looking for a mystery that offers crisp, highly-quality prose
that is meaningful, three-dimensional characters that you can relate to and a
plot that takes your breath away, but it’s perfect for a fun, fast-paced read. And
believe me, there are worse mysteries out there.

10/27/12

Maurice
B. Dix was an author of detective and thriller fiction who contributed to the
Sexton Blake Library, publishing most of his stories before World War II, but
the passage of time, unkind as ever, obliterated nearly every trace of the man
– even the Golden Age of Detection Wiki came up blank when I searched for his
name.

I
couldn't tell if Murder at Grassmere Abbey (1934) is a standalone crime
novel or a volume from a series of mysteries, starring the intuitive inspector
Gordon Frewin and the man-of-facts ChiefInspector Jimmy Miller, but the plot
is a smorgasbord of tropes, clichés and dust particles of good ideas.

When the
story opens, two separate cases are staring Gordon and Miller in the face. The
first consists of a gang of dope peddlers, using a fishing fleet to smuggle
cocaine into the country, and one of the men, "Steamboat Bill," a skipper of a
fish tender, Saucy Nan, threw a man overboard after finding him in bed
with his wife. The man died and Bill is facing a charge of manslaughter,
however, Gordon is convinced that it was carefully planted murder by the
mastermind behind the drug ring, but with the man on trial, he's summoned to
look into another case.

At Grassmere Abbey, Sir James Arnold was shot in his own library by an intruder and
his neighbor, John Forsythe, was arrested as the responsible party. The murder weapon, which Forsythe
admits throwing into the pond near the estate at the night of the murder, belongs to him. He was also
overheard having a violent quarrel with Sir James. The local constabulary lacks
any doubting shadows nipping at their heels about Forsythe's guilt, but the
prisoner has powerful and popular friends who want a second opinion from
Scotland Yard's finest. It's interesting to note how police-friendly this book
is. Aside from the local police, they are portrayed as intelligent,
well-trained, witty and caring people who go out of their way to protect the
innocent – even treading carefully to not startle the highly strung skeletons in the
overstuffed closets of the local gentry any further.

Gordon
and Miller were also the only "real" characters in the book, but only because
you could follow their trend of thoughts. You get to know them more as
policeman than as actual people. And no. I don't count that love
affair of Gordon as characterization. Oh, but there was one brief moment when
they were speculating on Miller's hatred for drugs, before it was shrugged off,
which felt as a willful act of non-characterization!

Obviously,
a clue turns up (i.e. a cylinder of cocaine) that ties together the two cases
just in time for the murderer to strike down a second victim: P.C. Brown was
standing guard on the scene of the crime when a bullet struck him in the face,
but the police seals on the doors and windows were intact. But don't expect too
much from the solution, which is almost insulting and belongs on the pages of one
the detective genres primordial ancestors from the 1800s. The same can be
said for most of the answers given in this story. Very disappointing.

Yes, I did dream up an explanation of my own to account for the unbroken police seals on
the doors and windows of the library, which is not only better, but would've
also smoothed out some imperfections (no spoilers for the actual solution):

The only
way to have made the murder of P.C. Brown work as a proper locked room mystery,
is if he had been killed by one of the "unknown" gang members, which is a role
I would've assigned to the local constable, Maples. He would've had access to
the house and was in a position to remove the seals, retrieve any evidence and
reseal the room with an official police seal. Unfortunately, he didn't counted
on P.C. Brown and a struggle ensued, in which he fatally struck his head on the
fireplace. To delay the discovery, he still applies a fresh police seal to the
door. This would've also accounted for why he was satisfied with the circumstantial
case against Forsythe and having Maples as co-killer would fit the pattern of
the story to a T.

But in
the end, Murder at Grassmere Abbey was just a bad, but readable, book
that began to teeter on the brink of idiocy once the pile-up of tropes and clichés,
dragged kicking and screaming from retirement, became apparent. Dix basically took
every preconceived notion that non-mystery fans have of classic whodunits and
shoehorned them in a book of just a little more than three hundred pages. Recommended
as a curiosity only.

10/21/12

A perusal
glance at the ever expanding quantity of impossible crime fiction, discussed on
here with accelerating regularity, persuaded me to go easy on the old hobby
horse and mix things up a bit. But the book I fixed upon, for a much-needed
change of pace, almost feels out of place on this blog and it still concerns an
impossibility depending on your criteria. After all, it's a wild goose chase
for a missing dragon on Valentine's Day!

Mike Resnick was an unfamiliar name to me when I chanced upon Stalking the
Dragon: A Fable of Tonight (2009) at theBoekenfestijn (Book Fest),
where excess stock is disposed of at bargain prices, and I have to admit, I was
drawn to this book by its fantastic cover illustration – evoking an
image of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) set in the Land of Oz. I simply
had to own a copy! By the way, I checked up on Resnick and he's a huge name in
the SF/Fantasy genre, sweeping up five Hugo Awards during his career, and
producing a steady stream of fiction since the late 1960s. All in all, an image
of a modern-day fictioneer.

John
Justin Mallory is an old-fashioned gumshoe with an ample supply of snappy
comebacks, who made his first appearance in Stalking the Unicorn (1987),
in which an elf named Mürgenstürm transports Mallory to an alternative Earth in
order to find a stolen unicorn. I want to read that book just to watch a less
jaded Mallory interact with the fairytale world he suddenly finds himself in.
It oddly reminds me of the premise of the BBC series Life on Mars
(2006/07), in which a modern day policeman awakes in the early 1970s of his
childhood and has to adjust himself while figuring out what's happened to him.
One of the few modern, character-driven crime series I enjoyed watching and
first season was solid gold.

In Stalking
the Dragon, Mallory has already adapted himself to his new surroundings and
it hardly surprises him when a distraught client, Buffalo Bill Brody, engages
him to find his tiny dragon, Fluffy, who's the heavy favorite for the
Eastminster pet show to be held the following day. Mallory suspects Brody's
competitor Grundy, a powerful demon, and plans to make quick work of the case,
but Evil Incarnate fancies himself a sportsman and doubles Mallory's fee if he
can bring back Fluffy in time – and it's during this nocturnal quest that mystery
and fantasy tropes really begin to intermingle. It should also be noted that Grundyknows what really happened, due to his demonic powers, but refuses to help Mallory in order to keep things fair. Well, that's one way of dealing with supernatural beings in a mystery.

Anyway, when the
case began, Mallory was accompanied by just Felina, resident office cat-person,
a walking appetite with a penchant for mischief and one of my favorite characters in this book, but along the way they begin to pick up an assortment
of characters that any other sane person would've left at the side of the road.

Would you have picked up Dead End Dugan, professional zombie and slowest
thinker on the otherworldly side of Manhattan, a cell-phone named Belle, who
constantly tries to seduce Mallory, or a samurai sword-wielding goblin? But
together they tramp those mean streets like Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Man and
Cowardly Lion strolled down the yellow brick road and just as in the journeys
of Atreyu (The Never-Ending Story,1979) and Stach (Koning van Katoren, 1971; translated as How to Become King), they visit many
memorable sites. My personal favorite was the neglected wax museum where the figures
of Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and Humphrey Bogart are perpetual hunched
over a statue of a bird – occasionally coming to life to threaten and scare any
lost soul who wandered in by mistake.

On a
whole, Stalking the Dragon was an enjoyable read and can be classified
as a proper detective story, adhering to the basic structure and keeping the
fabulous abilities of imaginary creatures out of the explanation also helped a
lot, but the overall plot hardly poses a challenge to a seasoned reader of
whodunits. It's something to bear in mind, but not something that should deter
you from reading the book. Resnick obviously wrote it to amuse his readers and
not to baffle them. I think he succeeded in doing so.

10/19/12

I only
recently learned that the missing and presumed dead Jonathan Creek
series has resurfaced to hopefully redeem itself, after an ungraceful plunge
into mediocre in the abysmal The Judas Tree (2010), in an as-of-yet
untitled Easter special – to be filmed in early 2013. The episode was originally
planned as a Christmas special, but Alan Davies' touring commitment delayed the
production a few months.

Scooby Doo, Where Are You?

Personally,
I'm as thrilled as an early 1900s shilling shocker! Jonathan Creek
has always been a very hit-and-miss series and The Judas Tree
represented an all-time low, illogical to the extreme and riddled with plot
holes, but the show's creator, David Renwick, also penned a few solid
contributions to the impossible crime genre (e.g. Jack-in-the-Box (1997)
and Black Canary, 1998). And hey, if we can forgive John Dickson Carr
for Patrick Butler for the Defense (1956), we can certainly forgive
Renwick for The Judas Tree.

And as we
eagerly await the first snippets of information on this new episode, I wanted
to take a look at an older one from the second season, Time Waits for Norman
(1998), which nobody seems to like except me.

To be
fair, Time Waits for Norman is an unusual episode – even for Jonathan
Creek! The impossibilities, up to this episode, involved tangible miracles
like a body inside a sealed nuclear bunker or a murderer, dressed-up as a
skeleton, vanishing from a closely guarded garage, but here it's a domestic
phenomenon of a man who only does things by his watch.

Maddy's
publisher, Antonia Stangerson, finds herself confronted with irrefutable proof
that her husband, Norman, was in America and England around the same time! It
begins when an employee of a burger joint returns the wallet of her husband,
which he left behind, but that’s highly unlikely because: a) Norman is a
vegetarian and b) he was in New York at the time the man says he was eating a
hamburger in the city. The man's story is on the threshold of convincibility,
but Norman's employer confirms that he attended an early morning meeting.

A most
singular problem, if you have to believe the evidence. Norman had a mere seven
hours to hop on a flight back to the UK, to apparently enjoy a burger at his
leisure, and hurried back to Manhattan in time for an important meeting. Maddy
becomes interested and automatically draws in Jonathan to pick Norman’s story
apart. Clues vary from a photo of Norman, taken in the UK when he was suppose
to be in a meeting, a cryptic note and a scald mark on Norman's foot
corresponding with the story of him spilling coffee in the burger tent.

It's all Shakespeare to them

I guess
this makes it for some people a dull and unexciting story to watch, because
it’s basically tearing an alibi asunder without a proper crime to go with. At
least, not a legal one. The motivation behind it all was very well done, even
better than the solution itself, but Renwick's biggest achievement with this
episode was showing a modern crime story that integrated a completely
impossible situation, crossing space and time, in a believable scenario – and
understanding what makes Norman ticks is key to understanding what actually
happened. It's also what made me enjoy this episode even more. Norman dreads
the passing of time and as a bit of chronophobiac myself, I felt empathy for
the poor sod and loved the idea that it was used as a basis for an impossible crime story.

In my opinion,
Time Waits for Norman is a criminally underrated and overlooked episode from
this series.

10/14/12

Lou Cameron (1924-2010) illustrated comic books before ditching the drawing table
for a typewriter and, from the 1960s onward, became a fictioneer who banged out
war stories, science-fiction, westerns and tie-in novels, but, from what I
gathered, he achieved ever lasting fame among pulp-fiction devotees for
creating Longarm – a U.S. Deputy Marshall from the 1880s who appeared in more
than 400 novels!

What put
me on Cameron's trail, was an entry for Behind the Scarlet Door (1971)
in my well thumbed-through enchiridion of impossible crime stories and the summations
of the problems in this book appeared almost identical to those in Hake Talbot's The Hangman's Handyman (1942). Corpses decompose with supernatural speed and an
assault is carried out in a locked room, but these resemblances are merely
superficial and I would associate the book with Theodore Roscoe's Murder on the Way! (1935). It's written in the same pulpy style, cloaked in shades of
noir, and the plot involves a coven of witches, druids, Welsh legends, zombies,
an invisible cat-like creature, body parts, zombie witches and an
immortal. I'm sure I forgot to list one or two more ingredients of this witches'
brew.

Sgt. Morgan
Price originally hauled from Wales, but came to America to live with his uncle and
aunt, after his parents passed away, and because he speaks the language he's dispatched to the City Morgue to join Lt. Brewster and Sgt. Curstis.
They are watching as the docters are cutting up the body of a young woman, Cynthia Powell, who came to them
a few days ago with a story as unlikely as her own death. Cynthia also came from
Wales and was making a living here chirping folk songs and got an offer to come
along to a Black Mass orgy in a blue-bricked house with a red door. She
witnessed how a man whipped out a gun and shot one of the hooded attendants,
but when the police began to checkout her story they were unable to locate the house. She
turns up dead a few days later. Well, days later...

The
coroner is pretty sure that the girl had been dead for week, or more, before
turning up at the police station with her unlikely story and they speak with
others who turn out to have been dead all along – and it's not just the zombies
dead weighting their investigation. They also meet an old Welsh man, deeply
involved with the coven, who claims to have been around for five-hundred years
and the lie-detector backs him all the way. Price is attacked when he wants to
enter his darkened apartment, after a cat-like creature is heard inside, but nothing,
alive or dead, is hiding there and still this only described a fraction of the
entire story.

I became
a bit of a skeptic, halfway through the book, as to how Cameron was going to
explain away this pile-up of apparently supernatural occurrences and outrageous
plot twits, without consulting the occult for an answer, but I have to say, he delivered
the goods.

It's what
you would more or less expect from a story as pulpy as this, but not a letdown
at all, and I admire Cameron for keeping in control when the plot seemed to be
running all over the place. The clueing is a bit flimsy though, but then again,
that's a charge that can be laid against a lot of crime novels published after
the Golden Era and you can still come pretty far in this one.

I initially
bought Behind the Scarlet Door as comparison material, not expecting too
much from it, but the book turned out to be a pleasant surprise that stands on its own
merit and comes especially recommended now that All Hallows' Eve is approaching.

10/12/12

The
elderly, gentle minded professor Theocritus Lucius Westborough, a scholar whose
expertise encompasses the Roman Empire, was the brainchild of mystery author
Clyde B. Clason who produced ten detective novels during the mid 1930s-and
early 40s.

Clason
belongs to the Van Dine-Queen School of Detection and was clearly influenced by
its members, from stories centering on collectors with private museums stuffed
with artifacts from erstwhile civilizations (e.g. The Man from Tibet, 1939)
to taking a murder tour in a business enterprise or institution like perfume manufactures
(e.g. Poison Jasmine, 1940), but more importantly, they were cleverly
crafted and minutely analyzed mysteries. Sad to say, Clason's insistency to
hang on to that particular branch of crime fiction also meant that, once the
sex and violence school of Mickey Spillane began to pick up momentum, he felt
there was no longer a place for the cerebral detective of yesteryear and never
wrote a follow-up to Green Shiver (1941) – which thus became Professor Westborough's
last (recorded) case.

However,
Clason left us with a small, but memorable, body of work and a notable one for connoisseurs
of miracle problems, because more than half of them contain a variation on the
impossible crime. Granted, they're not exactly spectacular illusions that are
pulled off with the routine of a Las Vegas stage magician, but simple, workable
(and convincing) gimmicks that are cogs in the machine of the overall plot. Clason
is one of those writers you can get an overall enjoyment from: stories as
intelligently written as they are plotted and populated with interesting characters
that move around in specialized fields.

For his
third outing, Blind Drifts (1937), Clason took a shot at explaining how
someone could be hit with a bullet fired from a non-existent gun in front of
seven witnesses in a mineshaft at a depth greater than the height of the Empire
State Building and to do so he dispatches Westborough from Chicago to Colorado as
one of the shareholders of the Virgin Queen Gold Mine – inherited from his late
brother. Barely out of the plane, the mild-mannered professor is thrust into a
feud between Mrs. Edmonds, major stockholder, and Jeff LaRue, owner of the
neighboring Buenaventure Mine, who wants to lease the Virgin Queen. This also
gives Clason an opportunity to illuminate his readers on the inner workings of
a gold mining company.

As
Westborough takes a few days to inform himself, he also looks into a local
mystery that may have ties to his current predicament, a department store owner
and a Virgin Queen director, George Villars, disappeared without a trace, but it's
the ongoing dispute between Edmonds and LaRue that ends up providing the main
puzzle for the mild-mannered professor. Instigated by the suspicious mind of
Cornalue Edmonds, they descend into the belly of the Virgin Queen, where,
inside one of the blind drifts and in front of a number of witnesses, Edmonds
is felled with a bullet, severely injuring her, and a smoking gun fails to turn
up in the subsequent search.

It's the
side-puzzle of the dissolved gun that contributes the most satisfying portion
of the overall solution, simple and therefore convincing, but the remainder of
Westborough's problems, including a pair of successful murders, are marred by a
convoluted explanation. I love ingenious, complexly woven plots that consist of
multiple layers, but juggling with timetables and travel schedules just doesn't
do it for me.

All in
all, Blind Drifts is a solid, but not the highest rated, entry in this,
altogether too short, series and will be appreciated by both fans of Westborough
and puzzle-oriented mysteries.

Clason's
work is fairly obscure and older editions of his books come with a hefty
price-tag attached to them, however, the Rue Morgue Press has reissued a seven
of his ten books and Blind Drifts is their latest offering.

10/7/12

Columbo
Goes to the Guillotine (1989) was the opening episode of the eight series and marked the return
to the airwaves of the disheveled homicide detective after a hiatus that lasted
more than a decade, but the intervening period had not dulled the lieutenants
prey drive or his duplicitous appearance – never missing a beat as he doggedly
pursues an opponent who's in the business of selling miracles.

Elliott
Blake is a self-professed psychic medium, who’s trying to weasel his way into a
well-funded military think-tank program that studies claims of extraordinary
sensory perception and finding a military purpose for it. Naturally, Blake's
claims are as a legit as a stack of counterfeit bank notes and the only reason
he has been getting away with his duplicity is because he has someone on the
inside, Dr. Paula Hall, to help him achieve the desired results. But it also
gives the heads of the think-tank hope that they finally got their hands on a
genuine psychic specimen, who can perform miracles on demand and plan to stage
another test conducted under the supervision of Max Dyson – an ex-magician
exposing fraudulent mediums and explaining supernatural phenomena.

Before
the test, Blake and Dyson meet on a bridge cloaked in the rags and tatters of a
misty evening and we learn that the gentlemen were imprisoned together in an
African goal, where Dyson got out of before Blake, and the two opponents part
ways like two duelists taking their paces. A very Doylean scene, if you ask me,
somewhat reminiscent to Jonathan Small's story in Sign of Four (1890).

Dyson's
experiment involves distant viewing and Blake is positioned in an isolation
chamber, while three soldiers are scattered throughout the city in unmarked cars each with a small suitcase
consisting of a blind fold, a marker, a city map book, a rubber band and a Polaroid
camera. The soldiers have to blindfold themselves, flip through the book to
mark a random location and drive to it in order to snap a picture and send it
to HQ. Meanwhile, Blake is probing the minds of the soldiers, drawing pictures
of what they photographed, and they match up pretty good! What I liked about
the solution is that's basically textbook stuff, as Jonathan Creek would've
said, that only works on paper, but what made it work here was that the trick
was pulled-off under rigorous test conditions. It's so clever that the one
trick that would be very difficult, if not impossible, to pull off becomes
possible when you put a few obstacles in its way to prevent cheating.

One, none-spoilorish,
question though: were the really handheld scanners like that back in 1988/9?

The penetrating stare of a first-rate mind.

Anyway,
performing a magic trick in front of a captivated audience, insistent on being
fooled, is not, necessarily, a crime that garners the attention of one of the
homicide squads finest, but Blake went back to Dyson when he was tinkering with
his guillotine and leaves his old cellmate headless in his sealed apartment – and before long Columbo comes knocking on his door.

When the
lock is cut out of the door, the lieutenant is confronted with what appears to
be either a bizarre accident or a grotesque suicide, but the detective
makes a few astute deductions that convince him that he's dealing with a
murder. A magician friend of Dyson, Bert Spindler, puts Columbo on the trail of
Elliott Blake and a battle-of-wits and deceit commences. Even though we know the
murderer's identity from the outset, Columbo's observations on a screwdriver, groceries,
tears shed at a funeral and the fact that Dyson died a day after his first
defeat at the hands of a psychic are more clues and hints than is necessary for
inverted mystery that plays out in front of your very eyes, but I love that the
writer took the time to explain his suspicions. Not as much attention is
bestowed on the problem of the locked doors and windows, Columbo finds the
solution in a book entitled Locked Room Magic, however, I can forgive
this since there was already a grand trick in this episode with Columbo reconstructing
it towards the end. So I was already more than satisfied in that department.

Unfortunately,
Blake is a lousy foil for the Great Detective, but only because he was
accurately characterized. Blake's whole shtick is essentially being this
enlightened being who unlocked the secret powers of his mind, but when you take
that away you're left with a rather dumb, gullible person who gets by on a few tricks taught to him by Dyson and Columbo played him like a violin throughout the episode. Fun enough,
absolutely, but I revel when Columbo has to chase a murderer as clever as him
and one who sees right through him – often resulting in a nifty character
sketch of the tousle headed sleuth.

Here's
the murderer from Prescription: Murder (1967):

"You
never stop, do you? ... The insinuations, the change of pace. You're a bag of
tricks, Columbo, right down to that prop cigar you use... I'm going to tell you
something about yourself. You think you need a psychologist. Maybe you do,
maybe you don't, but you are a textbook example of compensation... Compensation.
Adaptability. You're an intelligent man, Columbo, but you hide it. You pretend
you're something you're not. Why, because of your appearance you think you
can't get by on looks or polish, so you turn a defect into a virtue. You take
people by surprise. They underestimate you. And that's where you trip them up."

The
killer's opinion on Columbo who was hounded by him in Ransom for a Dead Man
(1971):

"You
know Columbo, you're almost likeable in a shabby sort of way. Maybe it's the
way you come slouching in here with your shopworn bag of tricks... The
humility, the seeming absentmindedness, the homey anecdotes about the family,
the wife, you know... Yeah, Lt. Columbo fumbling and stumbling along but it's
always the jugular that he's after. And I imagine that more often than not he's
successful."

And a
final character analysis comes from Columbo's opponent from How to Dial a
Murder (1978):

"You're
a fascinating man, Lieutenant... You pass yourself off as a puppy in a raincoat
happily running around the yard digging holes all up in the garden, only you're
laying a mine field and wagging your tail."

I love
it when Columbo has to fight a duel-of-wits on equal grounds, but that does
take nothing away from the pleasure or cleverness of Columbo Goes to the
Guillotine and enthusiasts of locked rooms should queue this in their
to-watch-list – even if you've already seen it. Murder is just so much more fun
when Lt. Columbo is fumbling and stumbling through a case, even in the re-run!

10/3/12

"I
suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so
transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action
is a matter of small moment."

-
Sherlock Holmes (Sign of Four, 1890)

You might
recall that, back in early April, I reviewed W. Shepard Pleasants' interesting,
but problematic, The Stingaree Murders (1932), which wrung out an
unusual and pleasing (pardon the pun with malice aforethought) story from the premise of a host of people cut-off from
the outside world – with an apparent invisible killer picking them off
one-by-one. If judged only on originality, Pleasants' book should be among the
more better known locked room novels, if only for the sheer audacity of the
last of three miraculous occurrences that he strung together, but the uncouth
racial attitude of the characters is what probably kept this book away from the
printers for a reissue.

I met
with a similar problem when leisurely strolling through Joseph Baker Carr's The
Man With Bated Breath (1934), a story as disentangled from the shackles of
reality as Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944) and Theodore Roscoe's Murder on the Way! (1935), set at the family plantation of the Gobelin clan in
Georgia where a whiff of old southern racism lingers in the air. The Man
With Bated Breath is not of the same caliber in reputation or content as
the two novels mentioned here before, however, it could've made a name for
itself as a marijuana-induced premonition of John Dickson Carr's The Hollow
Man (1935) – including a two-chapter scene as memorable as the locked room
lecture entitled "The Sin Party" and "The Sin Party, Continued." But more on
that later.

Like his
namesake would've done, Joseph Carr picked a young hero, named Frederick "Freddie" Carewe, as one of the central characters who's en route to
Lookinghaven plantation, where he's to don the chauffeur's pet for his new
employer, but before he can ring the doorbell he is confronted with a
gun-toting dame and the body of a man. The woman turns out to be Marigold
Theby, a relative of the Gobelin's, who stumbled across their dead lawyer. It's a
death that, at first, does not seem to matter to the family, because the
inoffensive man was, more or less, an outsider without an enemy in the world
and they regard the affair as unpleasant intrusion from outside, but they
remain unshaken throughout the story and one should not expect too much from this mystery
in the characterization department.

The
authors intent was writing a proper detective story and made few, if any,
excuses in the execution of that plan – like turning Carewe into Ruper Carnal's
unofficial sidekick. Just so he can be there when Carnal, who represents the
local law, examines the half obliterated mud print of a face and questions Gil
Gobelin on his unexplainable fit of laughter. It's just more fun to have
Watson, but when that same Gil calls in a private detective the plot slowly
begins to resemble the landscape of a John Dickson Carr novel.

Ocealo
Archer is a gargantuan detective with an insatiable appetite (I also considered
to title this post The Hungry Goblin or Feed Me More) and the demeanor of a
jolly Santa Claus, but still waters run deep and underestimating him is a fatal
error. Sounds familiar? I made a similar assumption, but you have to read the
ending of this book to realize how different Archer and Fell really are. But
I’ll say this, if this book was published a decade later, nothing could’ve
convinced me that it was not written a conscious mock parody of John Dickson Carr
and Dr. Gideon Fell. Nothing! Oh,
there's also a jewel merchant, Waldemar de Windt, there to purchase a
jewel knowns as the "Pekinese," who sets himself up as a rival detective – playing the Simon Brimmer to other detectives Ellery Queen.

Anyway,
everyone knows that the presence of a great detective does not prevent a
murderer from striking again. On the contrary, killers are drawn to them like a
moth to a flame and this nefarious person deserves bonus points for efforts.
One of the rooms in the plantation is a disused, empty gable-room that becomes
the source of a crashing noise that everyone, immediately, responds to. Four of
the family members make it into the room, after which they got locked in, followed
by gunfire. There's an open window, but a policeman below on the grounds
closely guards that one. When they enter the room bodies are scattered in the
four corners of the room: two of them are dead and the others are (severely)
wounded. The room is as bare of furniture as it's of hiding places for a
smoking gun, however, none turns up and the two survivors were physically
incapable of making it vanish. Not to mention that the policeman swears nothing
was dropped from or thrown out of the window and the victims were in such a
position that it eliminates the possibility of a sniper.

The
solution is up to scratch though not with the vivacity of the original Carr
(and the murderer was easy to spot), but you have to give this one props for
pulling off the vanishing murder weapon convincingly, which seems to be harder than it
appears. I find them to be very hit-or-miss. Ellery Queen's The American Gun Mystery (1933) should've been one of the more famous novels from their
earlier period, where it not for the botched and unconvincing explanation for
the dissolving gun, while John Dickson Carr probably came up with one of the best
and most simple answers in one of his stage play, "Inspector Silence Takes the
Air," collected in 13 to the Gallows (2008). A willingness to fairly
dispense clues also helps in overlooking some of its shortcomings. One of
the worst may just be that Carr neglected to weave the family story of one of
their ancestor, Mordecai Gobelin, who was hanged as a highwayman, done to replenish
the family fortune, with the abandoned gable-room. A ghost of a condemned highwayman
would’ve been the finishing touch and betrays that this is not a work from the
hand of the real grandmaster of the locked room mystery.

By the way,
I think the method would be perfect for one of Paul Doherty's Sir Hugh Corbett
stories and it would be a lot more convincing in a medieval setting. If you
know the solution, imagine it being done in a sealed, snow covered tower with a
vast expense of unbroken snow surrounding it. Perfect!

Then we
come to the "Sin Party," a gathering similar to Dr. Fell's "Locked Room
Lecture," except that Archer deals out marijuana cigarettes to stimulate the
mind and gives a defense for its use, but not before getting a lengthy description
of its effect on poor Freddie. What a great take on the wool gathering
technique of the armchair detective, but it has made me very suspicious of Nero
Wolfe's appetite and his insistency on privacy when he's up with Theo on the
rooftop greenhouse. And remember Rex Stout's remark about rolling their own? A Freudian
slip of the tongue, as they say? If you eliminate the impossible, whatever
remains, however improbable, must be the truth and I think the truth is that Wolfe's greenhouse is the most
exclusive coffee shop in the world.

Well,
I have to leave you at that and recommend this book to collectors of
alternative crime novels, fans of John Dickson Carr who want to read it for
comparison, and locked room enthusiasts like me, but let the read be warned, the
book may tax some readers sensibility as much as their deductive abilities. But
remember, we came a long way since this book was written and this kind of old-fashioned
racism should be taken as seriously as John Cleese goose-stepping in Fawlty
Towers.

The Usual Suspect

An Elementary Observation

Welcome to the niche corner, dedicated to the great detective stories of yore and their neo-classical descendants.

Witnesses' Statements

"It's my job to fan the fires of your imagination with tales of doom and gloom; right now I have another chilling tale for you. A tale of danger and mystery..."- Vincent Price (Grandmaster of the Macabre)."The detectives who explain miracles, even more than their colleagues who clarify more secular matters, play the Promethean role of asserting man's intellect and inventiveness even against the Gods."- Anthony Boucher.

"I like my murders to be frequent, gory, and grotesque. I like some vividness of colour and imagination flashing out of my plot, since I cannot find a story enthralling solely on the grounds that it sounds as though it might really have happened. I do not care to hear the hum of everyday life; I much prefer to hear the chuckle of the great Hanaud or the deadly bells of Fenchurch St Paul."- Dr. Gideon Fell (telling it like it is since 1933).